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The Following Was Prepared For An Interview With A Radio Station In Canada

QUESTION: You have written five novels and a blog.
What role does Canada play in your writing?

RESPONSE: It seems to me that Canada has always been a
refuge for oppressed minorities. In my first novel, Frank Yerby : A Victim’s
Guilt Harriet Tubman and Fredrick Douglass conduct fugitive slaves along
the Underground Railroad to St.
Catharines in Ontario.

St. Catharines was founded by
the Cathars, one of the world’s earliest oppressed minorities. In the 13th
century, Pope Innocent III ordered his knights to exterminate the Cathars in
what history calls the Albigensian Crusade. Those Cathars who survived the
massacre fled to Canada, founded St. Catharines and became known as Quakers

Canada became a refuge for
Native Americans fleeing America. As a matter of fact, the United States even
invaded Canada and initiated the War of 1812 because of Canada’s support for
the Indians. Before Sitting Bull was murdered by the US government, he settled
some of his people in Canada. Many of the survivors of the Wounded Knee
massacre escaped to Canada.

During the Vietnam era, thousands
of Americans sought asylum in Canada to avoid participating in America’s extermination
of Vietnamese people.

Today, as the American
government is kidnapping parents off of street and depositing them into
privately owned concentration camps, another category of oppressed minorities
___ Muslims and Hispanics ___ are seeking asylum in Canada. So to me, Canada remains
the sole refuge in the western hemisphere for oppressed minorities. And I try
to stress this fact in my writings.

QUESTION: Illegal immigration of racial and political
minorities causes a major concern for Americans. Some hate for non-white
immigrants was a major cause of Donald Trump’s election. In what way has
Canada’s policies giving refuge towards oppressed minorities soured relations
between the US and Canadian governments in the past?

RESPONSE:
To maintain peace with the United
States, Canada has had to submit to a lot of bullying from Washington over the
years. One example is the US seizure of Alaska. In 1897, when gold was
discovered in the Yukon territory, armed American fortune hunters flooded the
area. Americans with the backing of the U.S. government prevented Canadian
citizens from staking any claim to the land. Only American companies profited
from Yukon gold.

In the War of 1812, when President James
Madison ordered the invasion of Canada, the American army was as ruthless against Canadians as it
was in massacring Native Americans. Canada’s defense against the American
invasion in the battle of York is still commemorated as Canada Day. York
is a former municipality within the city of Toronto, Ontario . York Township
was home to one of the original Black communities in the Toronto area, which
was populated by many African American fugitive slaves. By 1861, the township
had the second-largest Black population in the Toronto area.

QUESTION: Your research reveals that there were
presidents of the United States with Negro ancestry before Barack Obama. What
role did Canada play in your research?

RESPONSE: The
black historian, J.A. Rogers, lists President Andrew Jackson as one of the
American presidents with Negro ancestry. But my research reveals that, although
General Andrew Jackson of the Tennessee Volunteers was a Negro, Andrew Jackson,
the seventh president of the United States was indeed a white man.

The story goes like this. When
President James Madison’s invaded Canada during the War of 1812, he left the
entire southern United States vulnerable to attack. So Madison decided to
protect the south by asking the governor of Tennessee, Willie Blount.
to send the Tennessee volunteer militia south
to Natchez, Mississippi to defend the southern United States from an attack
against New Orleans and up into the Mississippi River valley. However, even as
the Tennessee Volunteers marched to the defense of the United States, Madison
was informed, that Andrew Jackson, the general in charge of the Tennessee volunteer
militia, was not only a Negro, but a man who had adopted Indian children. The
War of 1812 was being fought to get rid of Indians, not adopt them, exclaimed
Madison.

So President Madison immediately
dispatched Major
General James Wilkinson, to Natchez to relieve
Andrew Jackson of his command. However, not only did Andrew Jackson refuse to turn
over his Tennessee militia over to Wilkinson, the Negro general marched his
volunteers back to Nashville, Tennessee. Madison was outraged. Thomas Benton
and his brother, Jessie, were sent to Nashville to forcibly remove Andrew
Jackson from his command. The pair assassinated Andrew Jackson, the Negro and had
a white man assume the general’s identity. This white Andrew Jackson gained
celebrity as the victorious general in the Battle of New Orleans and was
elected the seventh president of the United States.

It was Canada’s determined
resistance to America’s invasion that caused in this strange episode in
American history.

QUESTION: Who were the other presidents of the United
States considered to have Negro blood before Barack Obama?

RESPONSE: According
to J.A. Rogers, the others were Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren
Harding and Dwight Eisenhower. Hannibal
Hamlin ___ Abraham Lincoln’s Vice President during Lincoln’s first term ___ was
himself, a Negro. When Abraham Lincoln removed Hannibal Hamlin as his Vice-President
for his second term and replaced him with the unreconstructed, racist Southern
Democrat, Andrew Johnson, Lincoln signed his death warrant.

QUESTION: Your first book was Frank Yerby: A Victim’s Guilt. Who was Frank Yerby?

RESPONSE: Frank
Yerby was an Black writer who gave the world a body of literature that has
inspired and thrilled millions of readers. A brilliant storyteller, Yerby wrote
thirty-three novels and sold over a hundred million books in eighty-two
countries and in twenty-three languages. Three of Yerby’s books, The Foxes Of
Harrow, The Saracen Blade and The Golden Hawk,
were made into blockbuster movies.

Frank Yerby created the
literary genre known as the costume novel which addresses four themes:

the unsolvable problem of evil;

the
use of hate and prejudice to compensate for inferiority;

man’s
definition of himself through his relationship with God; and

the
eternal battle of the sexes.

Yerby was the first truly
multicultural writer. Through his writings readers transcend the religious,
cultural and racial barriers to achieve some understanding of the human
condition.

QUESTION: What other books have you written?

RESPONSE: In
addition to Frank Yerby: A Victim’s Guilt,
I have written Blood And Brotherhood: A
Novel Of Love In A Time Of Hate, The
Idumean Covenant: A Novel Of The Fall Of Jerusalem, Cassandra’s Curse: A Black Life In A Police State and Consort Of The Female Pharaoh: Hat-Shep-Sut,
Senen-Mut and Egypt’s 18th Dynasty.

QUESTION: What made you decide to write a book about
ancient Egypt?

RESPONSE: In
a way, I wrote Consort Of The Female
Pharaoh to compete with Frank Yerby. I could never match Yerby’s
productivity ____ he wrote 33 novels ___ so I decided to go back further in
history. Yerby’s earliest book, The Goat Song, goes back to approximately 300
B.C. and is set during the Peloponnesian War. My Consort Of The Female Pharaoh goes back to approximately 1500 B.C.

QUESTION: You have had an interesting teaching career
at several universities. What is the most surprising thing you learned from
teaching?

RESPONSE: My
students taught me over and over again that people behave according to what
they believe and value rather than behaving according to facts as things exist.

QUESTION: What do you mean when you assert that people
behave according to their beliefs and values rather than facts?

RESPONSE: I experimented
with my classes. For example in a Greek Thought class, when discussing Homer’s
Odyssey, I would have the class spend considerable time discussing the facts of
the story ___ the characters, what happened to them and why it happened. I
wanted the students to have a thorough understanding of the facts as Homer
presented them. Then I presented them with the following challenge:

You are a member of the victorious Greek army. You
have been fighting for ten years. Now, laden with treasure that you looted from
Troy, you prepare to board a Greek ship which will take you back home. Four
squadrons of ships are leaving Troy for Greece under the leadership of four
commanders: Agamemnon, Menalaus, Nestor and, of course, Odysseus, for whom the
book The Odyssey is named. Given what you have learned from reading the
Odyssey, whose squadron would you choose to join for your return to Greece?

Generally, only 2 students out
of 20 would make the best choice. Generally 10 or more of 20 students would
choose to return home with Odysseus even though not one of those returning home
with Odysseus’ squadron survived the journey; all of them died horrible deaths.
The remaining students would choose to return with Agamemnon whose entire crew
was massacred by Clytemnestra or with Menelaus many of whose crew perished at
the hands of the Egyptians.

The best choice according to
Homer’s Odyssey would have been to return with Nestor. All of Nestor’s squadron
speedily returned to Greece safely and without any loss of life.

QUESTION: You studied at the University of Lund. Why
did you decide to go to Sweden to study and what did you learn?

RESPONSE: I went
to Sweden to study the Swedish Ombudsman, which is an institution that is
reputed to protect Swedish citizens against arbitrary use of power by the
government as well as big corporations. What intrigued me about the Swedish
ombudsman was that it guaranteed basic rights to all Swedish citizens ___
rights that are available to American citizens only if they have money and a
high priced attorney. In Sweden, if a private citizen is harmed by the
government or a corporation, the Ombudsman will come to his aid without being
paid. In America, if a private citizen suffers injury, that citizen must secure
legal representation and seek a remedy from a court system predisposed towards
government and corporate rights over those of private citizens. As a matter of
fact, American courts have given corporations
greater citizenship benefits than private citizens , themselves.

I was especially interested
in going to Sweden to understand what Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish intellectual, learned
about race relations. Myrdal was paid by the Carnegie Foundation to come to the
United States in 1943 to recommend methods of reducing America’s Negro
population by means other than the legal and extra-legal lynching that were
being were currently being employed.

Myrdal recommended in his
book, An American Dilemma: The Problem of the Negro in the American Democracy
forced sterilization, mass incarceration, economic deprivation and biological
susceptibility to disease. Myrdal also recommended that white people maintain
absolute control over black leadership and fully utilize the services of black
preachers.

QUESTION: Are you working on another book or another
project? What would you like to accomplish next?

RESPONSE: I
have been researching a book for a while, but I am not certain it will ever be
written. The publication costs of my other books have caused me to reconsider
any future project. In 2006, I hosted a Frank Yerby Symposium at the Oakland
Museum and showed the movie based upon Yerby’s best seller, Foxes of Harrow.

I would like to produce a second
Yerby Symposium and show Yerby’s other movies, The Saracen Blade and The Golden
Hawk

QUESTION: Speaking of movies, do you have any videos
on YouTube?

RESPONSE: My
wife and I made a video to accompany our presentation to the Concerned
Educators of Black Children at the International Reading Association’s 56th
Annual Meeting in 2011 entitled Meeting The Challenge. Meeting The Challenge.
This video was shown at the Oakland International Film Festival. I have a
trailer for Consort Of The Female Pharoah.
I have a video summary of the Frank Yerby Symposium. My daughter, Jennifer,
recorded a video of my presentation at the August Literary Festival in 2013
when the first Frank Yerby Literary Prize was awarded.